Historically, computer printers began as a straight-forward solution to the problem of how best to transfer electronically stored data into paper form. Prior to the widespread adoption of the personal computer, most computer printers were large industrial devices found only in computing centers that were intended for executing print jobs off mainframe computers. These devices were typically high-speed impact or line printers that printed one line of text at a time. As well, they used fixed font character type to print text only, usually on fan-fold paper perforated along the margins that allowed feeding of the paper through the printer. Then, beginning in the early 1980s, personal computing came into vogue and computer printers evolved into desktop and sometimes portable printers using dot matrix, ink jet, and, to a lesser degree, text-only daisy wheel print technologies. A few years later, laser printers began entering the mass market.
Over the ensuing years, personal printing technology matured and came to embrace both color and monochrome output on many forms of hardcopy media besides traditional paper. Today, computer printers are widely available using a wide range of printing technologies, including liquid and solid ink, toner, dye-sublimation, and inkless. These printers can often be connected through numerous standardized interfaces, whether wired or wireless, and can be dedicated to a single computer, or shared collaboratively over a computer network.
Despite the progress made, computer printers throughout their evolution have remained an adjunct to the computer to which they are connected. The heavy lifting needed to prepare the electronic data for printing, whether word processing, desktop publishing, computer-aided design, graphics or photo editing, and so on, is invariably centered on applications running on the computer, and all user interactions on how the printed output ultimately looks are via the computer's (or increasingly other device's, such as phones and tablets) user interface by which printer operational parameters are set.
The result has been that computer printers are still primarily an accessory that serves the purpose of outputting hardcopy and remain passive participants in the transformation of the electronic data progenitor to that output. Some printer manufacturers have focused on adding additional features and capabilities to their printers; however, the problems and issues that users have with printers seldom pertain to a lack of features. Rather, their dissatisfaction usually has to do with the basic operation of their printers. In particular, the user interface for printers is often a reason for frustration, including the lack of predictability about what the printed image will look like, as a direct result of the printers being considered output-only devices that are disconnected from the end-to-end process of transforming electronically-stored data into some form of hardcopy output.
Thus, there remains a need for providing a printer that can be used with a computer (and other devices), yet which incorporates an user interface that provides more than simply control over print-specific operational parameters and which holistically participates in the printing process.